Everyone who supported Graham Platner, me included, is now in exactly the position I was worried about a few weeks ago.
I said then that I believed he really does care about the issues he talks about. I still think that.
The problem was that he seems to have an uncanny ability to put the things he claims to care about directly in harm's way. Well, we are watching that happen in real time, and the thing he cares about is us.
The infidelity reporting was already not just a “personal matter” to me, because discipline in private life is not magically unrelated to discipline under public pressure. Today's sexual assault allegation is a different category altogether.
The only cool thing he could do at this point is admit fully and without qualification what happened, and let the legal system and voters decide. In other words, he could demonstrate the values he says he has, at full scale, with words and behavior in sync.
What Democrats and progressives cannot do is recreate the exact moral logic we have condemned for a decade because this time the man cares about minorities, about those who will spend their lives at low standards of living despite hard work, and about destroying billionaire (well, I guess now trillionaire) capitalism.
If your first instinct is to attack the woman who came forward because the candidate is useful, you are not protecting the movement. You are teaching every woman watching that progressive values come with an asterisk, which they don't. That is how movements rot.
What Graham Platner has proven is that people want his policy platform. Let's take that evidence and parlay it into something stronger.
Again, the most powerful thing Graham Platner could do right now is stop leaving the mess to the people around him. Stop putting his wife, his supporters and the issues he says he cares about in the blast radius of his own choices.
If he wants to stay in the race, stay in the race, but do it by putting himself (not his wife, his supporters or his causes) at profound risk by being radically honest. Let the process run and let voters decide with full information.
We are in crazy times, and who knows what could happen.
Otherwise, the rest of us do not need to become unpaid defense attorneys for him. We can still get extremely similar policies with Troy Jackson.
We can want Susan Collins gone, oppose billionaire power, support labor, support healthcare, support antiwar politics, and still refuse to attack a woman to make the electoral math less inconvenient.
Being a progressive is almost like being anti-convenience, because we don't sweep those who are harmed by the actions of the privileged under the rug. We are weird because we love to stand for that, even though it is not convenient.
That is our minimum standard, and even though all of this is highly inconvenient, we should not be anything less.